(1) Field of the Invention
The present invention relates to recorded announcement systems for use in conjunction with a telephone central office and more particularly to a programmable solid-state recorder/announcer system providing for such services as wrong number time or weather announcement, etc.
(2) Description of the Prior Art
One of the many functions that a telephone central office must provide is that of recorded announcements such as: time announcement, weather announcement, wrong number announcement, disconnected number announcement and other miscellaneous announcements. Typically, such announcement messages are provided by some form of tape recorder medium. Historically tape recorders were considered a vast improvement over operators who had to deliver this type of information to telephone subscriber's.
GTE Automatic Electric is a manufacturer of recorded announcement intercept units. Two of these devices are the INT-2, a tape loop type intercept and the MCF unit which is a drum tape intercept. Subsequently manufactured is an INT-3 intercept unit which is similar to the INT-2 in that it is a tape loop type intercept. Such tape loop type intercept devices have the disadvantage in that the type loop has a definite service usage life. That is, these tapes become distorted and useless after a specific usage period.
The tapes used on tape loop type intercept units such as, the INT-3 and the INT-2, may have a useful life of up to a million cycles of announcement messages. Typically, these tapes should be replaced After a quarter of a million cycles. In large telephone central offices, it is not uncommon for a particular tape loop type intercept unit to require four or more tape loops per year. Although such tape loops are relatively inexpensive, it is costly for maintenance personnel in the telephone central office to be required to replace these tape loops several times each year.
Drum intercept units, such as the MCF, exhibit the problem that the drum must be lubricated periodically in order for its associated tapes to remain usable. Again, such required scheduled maintenance is costly to the operation of large telephone central offices. Additional problems exhibited by both the tape loop and drum type intercept units are wear of the recording and playback heads, motors, bearings, idlers, etc. It is a simple law of mechanics, that when two surfaces move in contact with one another as in the case of a tape head against a tape or the shaft motor against a bearing surface or an idler against a bearing surface that both of the surfaces will be slowly but inevitably worn. The manpower required for scheduled maintenance is the chief problem exhibited by the above mentioned intercept units.
A partial solution to the above mentioned problems is exhibited by U.S. Pat. No. 4,016,540 issued on Apr. 5, 1977 to G. P. Hyatt, which teaches an apparatus and a method for providing interactive audio communication. This patent describes a relatively large size computer system that employs synthesized speech signals to interact with an operator whereby the synthesized speech signals are transmitted to the operator. Digital information representing a message is pre-stored in a memory. Such message information is accessed in response to operator generated signals to provide audio messages to the operator. This system provides speech replies to the operator, but provides no arrangement for the recording of the operators speech and subsequent storage thereof. This system provides for the audio output of pre-recorded messages stored in a read only memory.
A voice signal processing system for recognizing an input voice message and generating an output voice message is shown by U.S. Pat. No. 4,144,582, issued on Mar. 13, 1979, to G. P. Hyatt. Such system teaches no storage and reproduction of the exact voice message input to the system. Only voice recognition and output of a pre-stored message is shown.
Therefore, it is the object of the present invention to provide a digital recorder/announcer system, for use by a telephone central office, which is small in size, with no moving parts requiring maintenance, providing for the recording of audio speech signals and the playback of these audio signals in the same voice in which they were recorded.
It is a feature of the present recorder/announcer system to minimize the amount of voice storage memory due to the particular sampling scheme employed.
It is also a feature of the present invention to employ a stored program data processor controller to provide flexibility of the recorder/announcer system.